Pulp Fiction Prophet
by Dan Maculla
Summary: Colton Sanders was the next Stephen King, until he collapsed in front of his fans while doing a book signing in Albany. Over the next five years something wasn't right, Something had taken him over, and it was spreading the terrible truths of the universe under the guise of cheap paperback fiction. Warning: adult language. I will read and reply to all reviews, thanks!


**PULP FICTION PROPHET**

You want to know what happened to me? Alright, I will tell you. From the very beginning.

I've known Colton Sanders since our days at Miskatonic in Arkham. Back then we were just a pair of starving students with a proclivity towards literary studies. Sandy was not the pulp fiction giant that he is – or rather was – today, but a runt who occasionally got a short story published in the university paper. I was majoring in English literature and planned on going to grad school to get a master's degree and teaching credentials for high school Language Arts. Sandy was majoring in creative writing and partook in Miskatonic's author program. As I recall, he apprenticed under a small fry novelist who wrote out of Arkham in the summer months. He wasn't very big league, but had a bestseller or two.

I suppose that novelist did something right for Sandy because it was the summer of 1997, only one year after I got my credentials and two after Sandy's graduation, that I got an abnormally excited call from the otherwise morose Sandy. He was in New York. Although it took several minutes to quell his jubilant cries, I eventually surmised that he had finally been published by Anchor Books.

The manuscript, which you now know as _New York Times _bestseller _The Seventh Gate, _had been a long work in progress for Sandy. All throughout our time at Arkham the _Gate _hovered in the background of our relationship. To be honest, I never really understood what it was about until I read the paperback in 1999. Back then it was just a vague premise of sci-fi horror that lingered in the back recesses of our collective minds. Something about hyperspace, and the terrible, crawling things humanity found there.

By some stroke of luck and passion he had finished it in a good enough state for a major publishing house like Anchor. The hardback came out that November, and from there you know the story. From that day forth Sandy was showered in nothing but praise, money, and contracts. His work was flying off the shelves faster than Anchor could stock them. _The Seventh Gate _had been adapted into a wildly successful John Carpenter film, and Hollywood had the rights for the next two sequels that formed his _Cosmos _trilogy. It was, is, and shall be safe to say that most of the US population had read at least one of his books, and certainly just about everyone knew his name.

I imagine that is why all of this happened.

If you look back at Sandy's work now, you'll notice an odd shift in style and content in 2008, after the release of his latest short fiction collection. You may also recall his bizarre behavior from that year. His "disappearance" and later resurfacing in an obscure corner of the South Pacific several months later. His expensive trips to dark corners of the globe where sanity rots and hope turns to black fear. All this was well published in the international press. After all, you can't be the most prolific author of all time and just expect people not to care.

Ne experiences during this alien time in Sandy's life were infinitely more personal than what you read in your local newspaper, and therefore more disturbing. I can pinpoint when it all began to the day. March 20th 2008. I was teaching Honors LA III at a high school in Hamilton, New York. It was third block, and I was finishing my lecture on Poe and gothic literature when Casey Little, the school secretary, called up my classroom.

Sandy had apparently gone into convulsions while doing a book signing in Albany. He was transferred to the nearest hospital and had been unconscious for nearly six hours. Sandy's parents had died when we were at Miskatonic and he was an only child, so I was the closest thing he had to next of kin. Casey told me they could have a sub out within an hour and I should get to Albany as soon as possible.

I got to the hospital later that day. Sandy was still unconscious and the doctors were mystified as to what was plaguing him. I told them all I could to help. No he didn't have epilepsy. No he wasn't narcoleptic. Yes doctor, as far as I know Colton didn't have a neurological disorder. I was in Albany for the night. I attempted to sleep on a terribly uncomfortable hospital couch in Sandy's room, but my mental exhaustion and grief kept me from good sleep.

At 4 AM, about sixteen hours after Sandy's collapse, I awoke from my semi-consciousness to a faint stirring in the hospital bed next to me. At first I thought I was dreaming, or at least trapped in a hypnogogic state. But as the thickness left my mind and reality began seeping in there was no doubt that Colton Sanders, my friend, was waking up.

That day was one of the strangest of my life. Amidst the mad cacophony of doctors and nurses and needles and IVs, I was most disturbed by my friend's extremely odd behavior. He in no way, shape, or form recognized me, his closest friend, and yet that was unbelievably the least of my concern, for Sandy's entire intellect had drastically shifted. When he spoke to the doctors he did so in a forced dialect of English as if he had mastered the language just recently from a broken Rosetta Stone program. He exhibited no muscular or neurological defects, but when he moved he did so with the same alien nature of his broken English. He groped with his limbs awkwardly, and for several days saw a physical therapist to be _instructed_, believe it or not, in their usage. All in all my friend had the coordination and worldly experience of a fawn fresh from his mother's womb.

I hovered around Sandy for about a month after his incident out of concern. I used the rest of my vacation time to spend a week in Arkham at Sandy's house, although I basically had to lobby the bastard to get the privilege. I supposed I could not blame him. Whatever had happened to him that afternoon in Albany had cursed him with some sort of amnesia, and therefore I was as much a stranger to him as anybody. I mean, he would not have even known where his damn house was if I did not take him to Arkham. That week was incredibly awkward and strange, as was to be expected. And yet, I got the feeling his ignorance of me was not out of unfamiliarity, but rather distraction.

He moved with frightful purpose all throughout that week in autumn. That is, when I saw him of course. Most of the time he was locked in his study, not writing, but searching. Searching for everything. His days were spent glued to his computer screen, looking through online encyclopedias and news articles and museums for information about everything earthly and beyond. No subject escaped his eyes. Science, art, mathematics, literature, history, psychology, pop culture, astronomy, psychology. He read indescribably large amounts on each of them. It was then that I realized the horrible extent of his amnesia, as he was building his knowledge of the world from the ground up.

As I said, he only emerged from his study to eat and attend to a select few errands to the university. He ate his food with a grimace, as if everything he placed in his mouth was either rotten or exotic. At Miskatonic he would spend hours attending lectures and at the library. He would return with bags of ancient and arcane volumes. In particular, he was fascinated with some strange work of Arabic poetry written in the 8th century by a stigmatized poet named Abd-al-Hazred, He transcribed entire journals out of that bizarre tome with alarming speed. Other topics that especially interested Sandy included geographical surveys of Western Australia, particularly ones conducted around Pilbara in 1934, and an old Miskatonic professor named Nathaniel Peaslee, who taught economics before falling victim to a condition remarkably similar to Sandy's. Allegedly, Peaslee had involvement in the Pilbara expedition of 1934, as well as a shared interest in that Arabic poet, although this information was sketchy.

It was after I left Arkham that the travels and wretched communications started. Sandy had briefly mentioned a vacation or something that week I spent with him in March, and when he apparently disappeared in early April I contacted his editor at Anchor to see if I could find out where he went. Apparently he had flown out to Australia on the 2nd, presumably to visit Pilbara, yet requested to his business contacts at Anchor and in the press to keep it under wraps. This period was thus dismissed as his "disappearance" of 2008, until he was photographed by a fisherman in Micronesia in June. He returned from Australia towards the end of the month, on the 25th, and left for Saudi Arabia on the 27th without contacting me.

From there I managed to track his sporadic movements by harassing his editor for information. From Saudi Arabia he went to central Africa and from there to Eastern Europe. After that he did a brief stint in South America before resurfacing in Micronesia the next month. As purposeless as his journeys seemed, the editor insisted that Sandy had reassured him that they had some sort of intent. "Inspiration" for his next bout of writing. I suppose that was true in a then unimaginably terrible way that was beyond me. His travels ended in January of 2009, when he returned to Arkham for the next four years.

I am sure you are familiar with the insidious rumors that circulated throughout the press during the early days of his return, and I hate to give them any credence but they were for the most part accurate. It had seemed Sandy had developed a deep fixation on the occult during his travels, or perhaps before it if that Arabic work is any indication. Not only did he now spend day and night browsing, if you'll forgive the melodrama, the "forbidden lore" of the Miskatonic library, but he had begun to correspond with various figures associated in different and equally terrible ways with the supernatural and things much more sinister. He communicated at length with a secretive Freemason from Wisconsin, as well as various occult groups throughout the United States and the world at large, include a cultic group from a Massachusetts hamlet called Innsmouth, as well as the pseudoscientists and proclaimed "psychics" of _Alternative Magazine. _

It was a terrible time, and a great source of shame to both myself and Sandy when he returned to normalcy earlier this year. And yet the worst is yet to come, I fear, for it was in the time immediately following this period of malign esotericism that Sandy began to write his wretched new brand of "fiction", as you would call it.

It started with the publication of _5,000 AD _in June of 2009, as strange space opera/dystopian piece of sorts which chronicles the horrors of the cruel Tsan-Chan Empire. The book climbed the bestseller list with incredible pace. Then, quite shockingly, only four months later in October he published a thick, 1,200-page volume broken into three parts surmising the epic tale of Atlantis during its so-called "middle kingdom". It was written with incredible attention to detail to the point that one could not help but wonder if the mad author had glimpsed into histories which we know not of. Again, it was another bestseller. Anchor could hardly meet the demand of Sandy's eldritch new fiction. The next four years saw the publication of an incredible seven novels, each giving a vivid depiction of lost histories and the unnamable horrors of the past, present, and future. These particular tales of cosmic terror sent chills down my spine and into my heart even when I mercifully accepted them as mere fiction. Any reader of popular literature is by now well familiar with his tales of grand, incomprehensible "Outer Gods", who are ruled by the mindless abomination Azathoth. He wrote of ancient Elder Things, bizarre extraterrestrials who ruled the Earth eons ago. His most successful novel told the story of an evil creature beyond all rational thought that served as high priest to a great, old race of unnamable monstrosities. The public gobbled up this mad work with the careless enthusiasm elicited by cheap pulp fiction. His profits were quadrupled by sales during this period, eclipsing his early works like _The Seventh Gate, _and he single-handedly propelled Anchor Books into publication supremacy.

I distanced myself greatly from Sandy during those four years, and my dreams were haunted by what nameless things he had seen and done since that day in Albany. I never heard any complaints from the magnificent Colton Sanders in those four years either, for I think it goes without saying he was immersed in his work. He never went on any book tours or did any signings, in spite of Anchor's insistence, and just wrote unendingly in his deserted Arkham house. It continued like that until early this year when this whole insane episode of five years came to a merciful end.

As I now understand, he was working on his longest work yet. It was an epic novel of over 1,500 pages and according to his editor at Anchor, by far his most bone-chilling work yet. I surmised no more than this from Anchor, as they wanted to keep their next cash cow a reasonable secret. I only saw the thing once, although it was unknown to me at the time. I was visiting Sandy for the first time since that week in 2008, and when I entered his study to see Sandy typing rapidly away on his computer, I also glimpsed of a mountain of papers that lay neatly beside him in a bin. If the size of that unholy manuscript was any evidence, 1,500 was a rather modest figure for his inhuman effort.

He finished the colossal project in October 2013, and it was then that Sandy returned to the self he had left behind that afternoon in Albany five long years ago.

I was teaching in Boston now. The episode was eerily similar to that call I got in Hamilton though. Just like then, I received a call from the secretary, who told me Sandy had been attacked in his home in Arkham, and just like then, the school called out a sub while I made the long drive up to his house. When I arrived, it had already been blockaded off by a perimeter of yellow crime scene tape. To my relief, Sandy was unharmed and speaking coherently, if not frantically, with an EMT in the driveway. A police sergeant informed me that in the morning, while Sandy was working on his latest novel, an unknown assailant had sneaked into the house via an open window leading to Sandy's basement. Once inside, he attacked Sandy in his study, where he was found unconscious when the police raided the building several minutes after the incident. The most inexplicable thing was the criminal's motive. He hadn't stolen anything from house nor seriously injured Sandy, ruling out robbery and attempted murder. The nearest they could come up with was that he was attacked by a home invader who cowered out before he could get his hands on anything. Sandy's neighbor Al Pickman corroborated to the police that he saw the assailant armed with a bizarre device that at best resembled a rod comprised of an inextricable mess of rods, wheels, and mirror-like objects. No trace of him had been found.

The oddest thing was Sandy, who was still bursting into hysterics even by the time I arrived. Disturbingly, it had seemed that the last thing he remembered was giving his best wishes to an Alice Parker's daughter in the back of a paperback copy of _The Seventh Gate, _and it took some time to convince him that he was in Arkham, not Albany.

For all intents and purposes, Colton Sanders' mind had returned to the exact state it had been in when he collapsed in the Albany. He recalled nothing of the fiction he had written in that five-year interval, and was both impressed and appalled to learn a 1,500-page manuscript laid on his desk in the study. He knew nothing of his exotic and sinister travels of 2009 until reading about them in an outdated CNN article, and was downright horrified when he discovered his contacts with the occult. I stayed with Sandy for two days to help him return to normalcy and come to terms with the five-year gap that had been ruthlessly carved into his life.

Not long after I returned to Boston to resume teaching did Sandy's nightmares start. When I called him several months after I left he informed me of the ghastly visions he had been exposed to while he tried to sleep. There were vague glimpses of a variety of obscure subjects. He claimed to have had a recurring nightmare of a vast, stone chamber lined with oversized shelves and strange carvings of curved lines and other mathematical figures. He also had visions of an ancient city comprised of the same primordial masonry and architecture as the stone chamber, with towers that reached up thousands of feet into the sky. He also spoke in a more hushed tone of basaltic cylinders that he had likewise seen in his nightmares, and how they seemed to provoke an unexplainable yet familiar dread, as if from a past life. I promised to come up soon to check in on him and see if I could do anything to help him recover. I made the trip two weeks later, and stayed in Arkham for eight days that culminated in my arrival here.

On the first day, I talked Sandy into making an appointment with Nick Sanchez, a Miskatonic-educated psychiatrist in Arkham. We visited his office the next morning. Sanchez was utterly baffled by Sandy's case, and could not come to a diagnosis of any traditional psychiatric disorder after our first two visits. On my fourth day in Arkham, Sandy and I received a call from Sanchez informing us of a medical journal kept in the Miskatonic library. It was authored in the 1930s by Dr. Wingate Peaslee of the Miskatonic psychology department.

I immediately recalled the surname as the one belonging to Nathaniel Peaslee, the economics professor who suffered from a similar disorder to Sandy's. Indeed, Sanchez confirmed that Wingate was the second son of Nathaniel, and the journal, which Sanchez had recalled reading once during med school, concerned the professor's father and his as of yet undiagnosed condition.

That afternoon Sandy and I left for the university. When we arrived, the librarian on duty seemed apprehensive of Sandy, for he had remembered him only when he was possessed by the thing that sought the library's more distasteful works.

I almost wish we never read that journal, and remained blissfully ignorant of the evil goddamn _thing _that invaded Sandy's mind. Peaslee's journal described in great detail the case of his father, who first collapsed in 1908 and wouldn't regain his right mind until 1913, _five years later, _just as in Sandy's case. Other parallels existed as well. During the time period of 1908-1913, the senior Peaslee had developed an unhealthy fascination with the occult and spent many months travelling to the dark corners of the globe, just as Sandy had in 2008. The journal confirmed that in 1934, Nathaniel Peaslee had organized a Miskatonic-funded expedition to Pilbara that included other notable professors such as the geologist William Dyer, historian Ferdinand Ashley, anthropologist Tyler Freeborn, and Nathaniel's son himself, Wingate. Of the events that unfolded in Pilbara the journal made vague and idiosyncratic references to a document that was vacant from the journal, although it appeared to be written by Nathaniel after suffering some sort of breakdown while excavating in Pilbara and could originally be found attached to the journal itself.

The journal then went into great detail about the Nathaniel Peaslee's psychological condition. After returning to normalcy in September of 1913, Peaslee had, just like Sandy, begun to experience vivid dreams and visions relating to the events of that five-year period, the subject matter of which was not dissimilar to Sandy's. Peaslee too had nightly visions of a massive, vaulted chambers comprised of octagonal masonry and adorned with curvilinear designs. Peaslee had also accumulated a dread of basaltic objects like the cylindrical towers Sandy had seen in his dreams. It was perhaps the recovery of basaltic stone blocks at the Pilbara site that had driven Nathaniel Peaslee over the edge. Here the journal broke off into a bizarre description of the _denizens _of those ancient cities which both Nathaniel and Sandy had glimpsed.

I'm sure what I'm about to tell you is not going to do me any favors towards getting out of here, but at this point I do not care. The thing is gone now, the colossal manuscript it had been working on is ashes, and so is Sandy. If I have to rot in here for the rest of my life so be it. I'll trade that for the world's mercy.

Nathaniel had delved greatly into studying the things that inhabited his dreamscape and the singular one that had invaded his waking life between 1908 and 1913. The journal, which had evidently corroborated this information from the absent document, described them as the Great Race of Yith. According to Peaslee's writings, the Great Race were, are, and always shall be an extraterrestrial species that had colonized and ruled Earth indescribable eons ago for somewhere near 200 million years, at least in their terrestrial bodies.

The Great Race was of extreme intelligence and psychic ability, and most importantly, had mastered time travel. In the Peaslee writings, the Great Race had the ability to project themselves into the minds of hosts of practically any species in any future age. Their explorers had occupied the minds of people from every age of mankind's history, from the Cro-Magnon period to distant times thousands of years in the future. But our species was but a footnote in the full breadth of their travels. Not only had they projected themselves into other species that had and would become the masters of our planet both before and after our rise, but they had also discovered distant alien species throughout the galaxy and beyond. These weren't goddamn Greys they were finding either, but bizarre creatures that were both physically and mentally beyond any form of human conception. They would target members of the species who were of especial significance, so as to glean as much about their cultures and histories as possible before retreating back into their time.

When a host mind was possessed, it would be sent back into the bodies of the Great Race. The journal described their bodies as being incredibly strange "cone-like structures" of about ten feet surmounted by four limbs or appendages upon which various faculties were attached, including claws that could be clicked to serve as their form of communication. Other appendages ended in a three-eyed head which was surrounded by "flower-like" ears and "tentacles that served as hands", and a series of trumpet like objects of which no clear purpose was prescribed by Wingate's journal, although Nathaniel's writings were implied to have gone into more detail. This "mind-transfer" had served more practical purposes as well. The Great Race had migrated en masse via transfer into the cone-ish bodies which they inhabited at the time of Peaslee's abduction to escape their original, unmentionable species on their homeworld. They had done this again, fleeing into a species of "beetle men" that would rise after humanity's fall.

Look, I know this sounds completely fucking crazy to you, and to be honest it still does to me from time to time. Although after two days of study neither I nor Sandy doubted the existence of _some _sort of external entity that had been responsible for what had happened to Nathaniel Peaslee in the early 1900s, and what had happened to my friend just five years ago, I still am not entirely sure of the exact nature of that entity. Perhaps Peaslee's incredibly vivid depiction of an ancient, cone-like, Great Race was the reality of it, or perhaps they were just the result of millennia of application of human folklore to them by the returning minds of those they had kidnapped. Certainly there are some things we are just not meant to know.

Where Nathaniel Peaslee's experience differed from Sandy's however was in how the creature that possessed him exited his body. In the month preceding the Saturday morning in which Nathaniel regained his body, the creature had constructed a device to presumably exit the present and return to its wretched body elsewhere in time. The book's description of the device as "a queer mixture of rods, wheels, and mirrors" conjured in my mind Al Pickman's description of the rod he saw the assailant entering Sandy's house with. On September 26th, 1913, Nathaniel had dismissed his housekeeping staff and awaited the arrival of a "foreign-looking man" who later called an Arkham doctor to attend to Peaslee, who had lost consciousness. When he arrived, the machine was gone and Peaslee had begun the process of regaining himself.

Overall, the Peaslee affair had a feeling of _cooperation _to it, of _planning. _Evidently the man who entered his house that Friday night was an agent of the Great Race, or whatever is behind these possessions, who had assisted in seeing to the creature's return to whence it came. The event with Sandy, however, was certainly an attack. Why else would the agent sneak into his house through a discreet basement window and explicitly assault the creature that was in Sandy's body? It dawned upon me that whatever had possessed Sandy was by no means there with his master's blessing, so to speak. The journal made it clear that the Great Race had taken clear steps to avoid information about them leaking to the species and ages that they visited. Both Peaslee and Sandy had had their memories wiped, as did all of the men and creatures abducted by the Great Race. So why had this one literally published all the secrets of the universe and beyond during the five years he spent here? Talk about going off the reservation.

We deduced that this thing was a rogue, if you will. A renegade that had broken the rules of his kind to steal away to a time in the future where the knowledge of the Great Race could be shared rather than collected. Why that thing had done so I do not know. Perhaps it pitied us as a species and how we fawned blindly through life without the knowledge of eons past and yet to come. Perhaps it loathed us, and sought to drive us mad from the revelations. Maybe it was just operating on a morality we cannot even begin to comprehend. Or perhaps there was no morality or reason to the entire thing. I don't know. Whatever the case, the Great Race did not want more information to be leaked, and dispatched an agent to eliminate the rogue. It would have been easier to just kill Sandy and the being inside him, but for some reason they had decided to use a modified form of the technology that Peaslee spoke of to spirit the entity back to the past, likely to an unpleasant fate. I suppose they understood the ramifications of simply destroying a man as prolific as Colton Sanders.

The shock of these revelations dawned slowly but terribly upon us. At first we just could not believe the fantastic nature of them. And yet all of the evidence pinpointed towards it as the ill-known truth. We gave the Peaslee writings more and more credence during the two days that we studied them at the Miskatonic library till eventually we accepted them as fact. It explained in great detail everything about Sandy's condition, and we were desperate for clear answers at that point. Even in my more distant state of mind now I believe them. All the dots connected, all the connections were straight and made sense, that's all I can tell you.

But it was not the horror at discovering the vile creatures that were responsible for Sandy's abduction that we were both eventually driven to madness, but what these discoveries _implied. _You see, that _fiction _that I'm sure you're so familiar with, those digestible pulpy paperbacks that you just whisk off of library and bookstore shelves so you can get a good scare while comfortably reclined in an armchair with a mug of coffee and the warm heater on, those things are _real. _The mad horrors that the thing inside Sandy had written after its possession are all cold, hard facts about the terrible history of the cosmos, of truths that no man should be exposed to lest he go insane. And every man, woman, and child across America and the rest of the world has been innocently lapping them up for years now, not knowing of the terrible things which they swallow daily. It is undoubtedly for this reason that the rogue from the Great Race accessed the mind of the most widely read author in the history of our infinitesimal species: to spread its awful message as a prophet of the printed page.

With this knowledge Sandy vowed to do all he could to retract his work of the last five years. The afternoon after we finished our study of the Peaslee writings he contacted Anchor and begged them to stop production of the books, but to no avail. Why should they give up their most lucrative contract? They'll just keep selling that poison as escapist claptrap and their chairmen can die happy. Sandy was ruined by this, and proclaimed to me he would forever desist writing and live out the rest of his life as peacefully as he could while still fighting the publication of the works to which his own name was attributed.

I'm sure that's how this all would have ended too if he did not gaze upon the forbidden pages of the rogue's final tale, which until then he had kept under lock and key in the study's safe.

I had gone out late that final evening to return some books on archaic mythology to the university library. While there I gave my thanks to the librarian for allowing us access to Wingate's medical journal, and also took a moment to call Sanchez and also express gratitude for directing us there in the first place. When I returned to Sandy's house I noticed that all the lights were out save for the one in the study. As I entered I received no welcome from Sandy. He was distraught I figured, as was I, and not in a talking mood. Then, as I neared the study, I saw a clear liquid seeping out from under the room's door, and detected the distinct odor of gasoline.

When I entered I saw Sandy, irreparably insane beyond all description with bloodshot eyes and sweat trickling from every pore on his body, mixing with the gasoline that bathed his ski. He grasped a lighter tightly in his right hand. On the floor was an empty red gas can, and on his large desk was the massive stack of papers that made up the rogue's unfinished manuscript. Judging by the rustling of the papers, he had read only the first dozen or so pages, and that was enough to send him into madness.

I tried to calm him down as best I could, reassuring him that everything was going to be okay and that he was safe. Whatever he had glimpsed in the lost pages of that manuscript was not consequential to the secure here and now. But he deflected all my assurances, saying over and over again, "you can't imagine the pain, you can't imagine the pain that awaits us in the black gulf. I will NOT ENTER THAT BLACK GULF!"

And with that Sandy lit the lighter and the entire study went up in flames. The desk and the manuscript were mercifully among the first to go, turning first to smoldering embers and then I'd imagine grey ash to be carried away by the Massachusetts wind. I ran at full speed out of the study to escape the blaze and jumped straight through the foyer window in my hysteria. Through my own screams of grief and the roar of the inferno that was fast engulfing Sandy's house I could make out my friend's voice, calling to me from a black, charred figure in the flames of the study:

"I WILL NOT GO INTO THE BLACK GULF".

Everything gets messy after that. I remember fragments. The cool air coming off the Atlantic and Miskatonic River. The night wind, howling at me through the streets of Arkham. The stars, which to me used to be symbols of cosmic beauty, but now were blasphemous citadels of secrets that no man or woman should know. I vaguely recall running howling and screaming down the streets of Arkham as the sirens of fire trucks came up to put out the inferno at Sandy's house, and soon after being sedated by a group of paramedics as I splashed madly around in the Miskatonic.

Now I'm here, "rehabilitating" as you would say. "Recovering from psychological trauma". And yes, I suppose that is true, doctor, although you cannot even begin to understand the evil depths of that trauma, and the fact that it is one that I will never recover from. I can barely keep my mind from entirely falling apart as it is with limited information I possess of the books of that deplorable thing, and so I cannot imagine what horrid secrets were contained in that final work that Sandy glimpsed before lighting himself and all the truths it contained without feeling the hot whips of panic and madness lashing at my mind. I know that the greatest mercy my friend, Colton Sanders, can be afforded is to have his very name and all it was ever printed, reprinted, and marketed on wiped from existence. Even I have begun the process of forgetting I ever knew him, of our days at Miskatonic, and that excited phone call I got from him in New York way back in 1997, and the grief I felt when he collapsed in Albany five years ago. And now that have told my story, upon your insistence, I think I will give every last scrap of mental effort I have towards that goal.

Colton Sanders never existed. _The Seventh Gate _is just a myth, a fantasy-book that never climbed to the top of any bestseller list. There never was a book signing in Albany, or any book signing ever for Colton Sanders, as he did not exist. The books that "he" wrote after 2008 are just nightmarish fragments of a mental breakdown. The truths they contained are a fever dream. Reality is not real, and that's just the way I want it.

That's all I have to say doctor.


End file.
